An attorney involved in efforts to upend the results of the 2020 election was arrested in federal court in Washington this week and ordered to turn herself in to authorities in Michigan as civil and criminal cases involving claims of voter fraud collided.
Stefanie Lambert’s arrest came more than a week after officials had issued a bench warrant for failing to appear for a hearing in her criminal case in Michigan, where she is charged with illegally breaching voting machines, and days after she came under scrutiny for the release of documents as the attorney for an ally of former president Donald Trump in a federal defamation case.
Lambert was held at a D.C. detention center as a “fugitive from justice” until Tuesday, when a judge released her on an unsecured $10,000 bond with orders to turn herself in to the police in Michigan by Wednesday or face rearrest.
“As long as there is still a warrant out for your arrest, you can continue to be arrested over and over again,” D.C. Superior Court Judge Heide L. Herrmann told Lambert at her bail review hearing. The judge added, “If you don’t appear, you will owe $10,000.”
Lambert was in D.C. federal court Monday representing former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for repeatedly and falsely saying the company’s machines were used to tamper with votes in 2020. But she was the one being questioned, asked why she made public thousands of Dominion documents she had sworn to keep confidential.
Right before her arrest, Lambert admitted that she used the Dominion documents to argue that the case against her in Michigan is illegitimate. She said she also shared them with a southwestern Michigan sheriff who was investigated as part of the alleged voting machine plot. Over 2,000 pages of the documents were put on the social media site X over the weekend by an account using the sheriff’s name and photograph.
Dominion attorney Davida Brook said in court that “the cat is out of the bag” and there is no hope of getting those papers out of the public domain. But she said Lambert should be removed from the defamation case and face penalties for violating court rules and fueling fresh violent threats against Dominion employees.
“It has been nearly four years. When does it stop?” Brook asked the court. She said the company sued Byrne and others “to stop the lies, to end the threats of violence.” Now, she said, Lambert was “using these very lawsuits … to spread yet more lies and do yet more harm.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya said she needed more time to decide whether Lambert should be disqualified as Byrne’s attorney. But the judge said that in the meantime, both Lambert and Byrne could not have access to any of Dominion’s records, and that Lambert must move to seal the Michigan court document containing them.
After the hearing ended, the other attorneys left while Lambert was asked by the judge to stay behind. Several U.S. Marshals then entered the courtroom and locked the door behind them.
Lambert’s Michigan defense attorney, Daniel Hartman, said Monday that her failure to appear in court in Michigan “was not willful.” Instead he said it was because of “mixed messages” about whether she had to get fingerprinted while challenging the court’s orders. Just before Lambert appeared in court in D.C., Hartman asked the Michigan judge to reconsider the warrant for her arrest, calling the whole case a “tragedy.”
In a filing Monday, prosecutors in Michigan said they had tried to avoid having Lambert arrested “for fear that would unnecessarily traumatize her children.” But, they said, she “has been given several opportunities to turn herself in and has failed to do so,” and that there was no ambiguity about her requirement to show up in court.
In a civil suit, both sides are required to exchange evidence that might be relevant at trial. But in the Dominion case as in most, all the attorneys involved — including Lambert — signed a protective order not to share the material in any way unless the judge agrees it should be public.
Lambert argued in court that she was under no obligation to adhere to the protective order because the emails contained “evidence of a crime,” suggesting the situation was analogous to being handed “a dead body” as part of the case files. Specifically, she alleged that they were proof that “Dominion conspired with foreign nationals in Serbia” to undermine the U.S. election system. Dominion’s attorneys responded that this was a “xenophobic conclusion” based only on the fact that the company has some overseas employees. A Dominion spokeswoman added in an email that “any allegation that Dominion employees anywhere tried to interfere with any election is flatly false.”
Lambert only recently became Byrne’s lead attorney in Washington, but she said in court that she had been helping with the case since late last year and gained access to the documents sometime “after the holidays.” Given that she had them for weeks, if not months, Upadhyaya said “the dead body analogy rings hollow.” But she said she needed more time and more information before sanctioning Lambert. Her focus on Monday, she said, was “to prevent further bleeding” by figuring out who had access to Dominion’s information.
Lambert said in court that she gave only Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf access to the files, which Brook said totals over a million pages. But Lambert said Leaf shared the documents with other sheriffs and members of Congress. Leaf, who has not been charged in the Michigan case but is fighting a subpoena, did not return a request for comment. Lambert added that Byrne shared the documents with “the U.S. attorney’s office.” She said she did not know which one; there are nearly 100 U.S. attorneys running federal prosecutors’ offices across the country.
Lambert argued that Byrne is “a national intelligence asset” who was entitled to share “national security information” with law enforcement. Byrne left the company he founded in 2019 after saying he had been instructed by the FBI to pursue a romantic relationship with Maria Butina, a Russian national convicted that year of being an unregistered foreign agent. (Former FBI officials have called that assertion “ridiculous.”) Byrne has since become a prominent source of false claims about the last election, and he met with Trump and others at the White House to discuss ways to keep Joe Biden from taking office.
Byrne did not appear in court Monday; Upadhyaya said he must come to the next hearing to answer questions about what he did with the Dominion papers. Asked about the documents, he said by text message: “I’m just a humble concerned citizen.”
Dominion was alerted to the leaks by Byrne’s previous attorney, Robert Driscoll, who also represented Butina. In an email made public in court filings, he said he had learned about the leaks through social media and “asked Ms. Lambert to take immediate steps and reasonable efforts to prevent further disclosure of Confidential Discovery Material.”
Lambert was involved in former Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s unsuccessful lawsuits to block certification of the 2020 election results, and records indicate both were involved in efforts to access voting machine data in Georgia as well as Michigan. Powell has pleaded guilty in Georgia state court to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties. A description of an unindicted co-conspirator in the Georgia case, in which Trump and others are described as engaging in a racketeering scheme, matches Lambert.
Lambert’s criminal trial was set to begin April 1, but prosecutors say her recalcitrance has forced a delay. They added that they may now seek to have her detained until trial because she did not voluntarily turn herself in on the bench warrant.
A trial date has not been set in the Dominion case. The company last year settled a similar suit with Fox News for $787 million, and is also suing former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Powell along with the right-wing television station OAN and the pillow businessman Mike Lindell.
A previous version of this article misspelled Stefanie Lambert’s first name as Stephanie. The article also said Lambert was held at the D.C. jail. She was held overnight in a cell block closer to the courthouse. The article has been corrected.
